Increasingly, there has developed a market place of digital services which are accessible on line. For example on the internet, there are available music services such Napster® and like services, as well as video services, printing services, and many other services. One of the features of a digital market place is that suppliers and customers cannot meet face to face, and transactions are conducted electronically. Two counter parties to a transaction cannot easily gain any measure of how much to trust each other. In particular, there is an asymmetry of information between the service provider and the customer concerning the basic elements of a business relationship including trust.
The service provider will have invested in their web site, and provide information to the customer concerning the service, possibly with some free samples of electronic data. On the other hand, the customer provides little information to the service provider concerning the customer's requirements.
How to maintain trust and reputation in the market place is a known economics problem, and various writers have addressed the issue in the prior art. For example workers such as Akerlof (1970) have published several papers, one of which is entitled ‘the market for lemons’, in which the impact of customer information in the second hand car market is discussed, and which concludes that if customers do not have information about the quality of goods, they will not be able to tell the difference between good and poor quality goods or services, and the price will tend to the lowest price, which in turn encourages producers to produce the lowest quality and cheapest goods/services. Conventionally, there are two approaches to dealing with degradation of the market. A first approach, is to standardize a product or service, so although the product or service may not be top quality, it is of reproducible quality. The second approach, is to improve the reputation of the business, so the customers have confidence in the business, and the business can charge higher prices. Customers are expected to accept whatever quality that business produces.
Consequently, information about the reputation of a business is useful in controlling the market. However, this type of information is absent in an electronic commerce environment.
It is known for businesses to try and improve their reputation by various mechanisms, including sponsorship of charitable events, and advertising. Customers may gain an appreciation of the reputation of a business through the visibility of those charitable events and through advertising, by word of mouth, or by trusted third parties, for example consumer quality magazines. None of these prior art methods apply directly to an online environment.
Problems in a digital services market include how to establish a reputation of a business online, and how to collect online information relevant to the reputation. A presently unsolved problem is how to collect reputation information with minimum of effort on the part of the supplier of the information.
The reputation information can be used to make decisions about which member to deal with in future, and is therefore valuable information. Reputation data is generated in a distributed manner without central management, and is therefore a frequently discussed service in distributed computer networks. Prior art solutions include filling in a feedback form, in which a user answers questions about their usage of a particular service provided on line. However, the ineffectiveness of feedback forms is well known. Completing a feedback form involves a user typing text into a set of text data entry boxes on a visual display screen.
Referring to FIG. 1 herein, there is illustrated a prior art system of a plurality of service providers 100, 101 communicating over the internet 102 with a plurality of users each having a user computer 103, 104.
Individual service providers may provide facilities within their websites to collect customer feedback data from a plurality of users.
Referring to FIG. 2 herein, there is illustrated schematically one instance of a user computer 200 and one instance of a service provider server computer 201, showing a prior art browser installed in the user computer, and a web server application installed in the service provider computer, which forms the basis of many internet based e-commerce services in the prior art.
The user computer 200 comprises one or a plurality of communications ports 202 for communicating over an internet link 203 with the service provider; a processor 204; a memory device 205; a data storage device 206, for example a hard disk data storage unit or the like; a user interface 207 including a visual display monitor, a keyboard, and a pointing device such as a mouse, trackball or the like; an operating system 208 of known type, for example Unix®, Linux®, or Windows® operating system; a web browser 209 for example a web browser comprising the operating system such as the known Windows Internet Explorer, or a separate browser such as a NetScape® browser; and one or more applications programs 210.
The service provider server computer 201 comprises a communications port 211 for communicating with the one or more user computers; a processor 212; memory 213; a data storage device 214, for example an array of hard disks, such as a RAID array or the like; an operating system 215, for example a Unix®, Linux®, or Windows® operating system; one or more databases 216, which may contain content data subject of a service provided by the server computer; one or more service applications 217, for enabling the server computer to provider a service; a and web page generator 218 for generating a web site, which can be viewed using the browser 209 of one or more user computers.
Feedback data relating to a customers experience is collected by the website, by a user filling in a form served by the website application and viewable on the users browser. Referring to FIG. 3 herein, there is illustrated schematically a view of a prior art browser as displayed on a screen on a prior art user computer. The browser comprises a back icon 300 enabling a user to step back one stage from a current web page which is being viewed in a view area 301, and a forward icon 302 enabling the user forward one or more pages from a presently viewed website. The back and forward icons are examples of user-activatable transport-control elements for moving the displayed page view within and/or between pages.
Referring to FIG. 4 herein, there is illustrated schematically a logical diagram of prior art operation of a prior art search engine 400 responding to a plurality of queries from a plurality of user browsers 401-404. Each browser sends a query message to the search engine requesting a website or requesting a search. The search engine sends replies back to the browsers, listing search engines and providing websites and web pages in response to the queries.
In the above prior art systems, reputation information can be handled by virtue of filling in response questionnaire forms presented on line at the browser. For example the E-bay® website allows users to submit a form which describes whether their transaction was good or bad for that user.
However, the internet currently has several features which makes it difficult to collect detailed information about websites. Firstly, download times for information from websites, although improving, are still quite slow, and are not instantaneous. Users are reluctant to enter into any long form filling processes on screen, because of the communications delay between the users computer and a website, sometimes over a slow and unreliable legacy communications link. Secondly, users are pre-disposed not to give detailed information, because it takes time, and users of the internet wish to use their time more effectively whilst on line. Thirdly, there is a general reluctance to give out information on the part of users, where there is no direct benefit to the user. Users are likely to give information as part of a transaction, but otherwise where there is no transaction, users are reluctant to give information for security and privacy reasons.
Therefore, a technical problem is how to make it easy for users of electronic services to provide reputation information, so that every time a user makes an interaction with a service provider, information concerning the reputation of the service provider can be collected.
Another problem is to overcome the reluctance of users to voluntarily give information about a website or service online, where the questions asked may be viewed as intrusive or unnecessary to a user of a service.